Observation can be difficult to prepare for and / or analyse, so this method may be best suited to students who have done it before or who will use observation in their future academic programme (eg Education, Psychology, other Arts and Social Sciences).
You need to think carefully to predict the categories you are going to record.
You can’t identify the causes of the behaviour you observe
There may be issues of reliability – do different observers see the same things? Do they record them the same way?
A major problem can be that you understand what you see subjectively, and you may be influenced by your own culture, experience and beliefs. Different observers may understand the same situation in different ways.

	Created by Rachel Elmslie over 8 years ago

A brief introduction to using observation to gather data for your SIS Project.